A manager finished an expensive leadership program not long ago. The strategy sessions were led by an INSEAD instructor and everyone expected those to be the highlight. Instead, the part that actually changed how this person manages day to day was a feedback framework taught almost as an afterthought, tucked into a "soft skills" session nobody was paying much attention to going in.
That's a strange thing to admit out loud in a room full of people who paid a lot of money for the strategy content. But it lines up with something L&D teams have known for a while and rarely act on. The skills that change behavior are usually the ones that get practiced, not the ones that get explained.
Why the Strategy Sessions Didn't Stick
Strategy content is built to be understood once. A manager hears a framework, nods along, maybe takes a few notes, and moves on. There's no reason to come back to it until the next quarterly planning cycle, and by then most of it is gone.
That's not a knock on the person or the instructor. It's how memory works. Research on the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, first documented in the 1880s and confirmed repeatedly since, shows that without reinforcement, people forget roughly half of what they just learned within an hour and up to 90 percent of it within a week. A single well-run session, no matter how sharp the content, is fighting that curve the entire time.
Soft skills training runs into the same problem when it's delivered the same way. A one-day workshop on giving feedback is just as forgettable as a one-day workshop on market positioning if neither one gets practiced again after the room clears out.
The skills that change behavior are the ones that get practiced, not the ones that get explained.
What Made the Feedback Framework Different
The part of the program that stuck wasn't better content. It was better exposure. A feedback framework taught in a single session and then never revisited would have faded exactly like the strategy material did. What made it stick was almost certainly the fact that managers kept running into chances to use it. A one-on-one this week. A tense conversation next week. Small, repeated reps that turned a slide into a reflex.
This is the difference between teaching a skill and building a habit. A skill lives in your notes. A habit lives in how you actually act when a direct report pushes back on feedback in real time, with no framework in front of you and no time to think it through.
Groveland calls the gap between the two the Habit Tax. It's the cost a company pays every time it trains a manager on a concept and never builds in the repetition that turns the concept into muscle memory. The training budget gets spent. The behavior doesn't change. Six months later, the company is paying for a second workshop to reteach the same idea.
What This Means If You're Choosing a Leadership Program
If you're an HR Director evaluating vendors right now, the question worth asking isn't whether a program covers the right topics. Most of them do. The question is whether the program is built around single sessions or repeated practice.
A program built around single sessions delivers information. A program built around cohorts, spaced practice, and real scenarios builds behavior. The manager in that story got lucky that one session happened to include enough built-in reinforcement to stick. Most managers don't get that lucky, because most programs weren't designed with retention in mind at all.
This matters most for the exact population Groveland works with: people promoted into their first management role with no formal training, expected to run one-on-ones, give feedback, and hold people accountable starting week one. Those are soft skills in name only. In practice, they're the highest-stakes skills a new manager will use, and they're exactly the ones most likely to get taught once and forgotten by Friday.
Frequently Asked Questions
Hard skills are technical and specific to a role, like reading a P&L or running a piece of equipment. Soft skills are interpersonal, like giving feedback, running a one-on-one, or managing conflict. New managers usually already have the hard skills that got them promoted. They're missing the soft skills nobody taught them.
Without reinforcement, memory decays fast. The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve shows people forget around half of new information within an hour and up to 90 percent within a week if it's never revisited. A single training session, however good, is working against that decay the whole time.
It depends on the complexity of the behavior and how often someone gets to practice it, but the short answer is longer than one session. Habits form through repeated, spaced practice in real situations, not through a single explanation, which is why cohort-based programs with ongoing practice outperform one-time workshops.
They can be introduced in a single workshop. They can't be built there. A workshop can explain what good feedback sounds like. Turning that into something a manager does automatically under pressure takes repetition over weeks, not a single afternoon.
Look past the topic list and ask how the program handles reinforcement. Does it end after one session, or does it build in spaced practice, coaching, and real scenarios over time? A program with the right topics and no reinforcement plan will produce the same forgettable results as a one-day workshop.
Source data: Ebbinghaus forgetting curve research; DDI Global Leadership Forecast; CEB/Gartner research on manager development and training retention.